


So they are either like spaghetti or Spaghetti Os

by middlemarch



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Doctors & Physicians, F/M, Fanfiction, Feminist Themes, Gen, Marriage, Memories, Pop Culture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-23
Updated: 2016-06-23
Packaged: 2018-07-16 17:40:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7277602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mary and Jed have a lengthy discussion on the nature of art and the societal constructs that surround it-- by referencing nearly a squintillion pop culture touchpoints and also, math.</p>
            </blockquote>





	So they are either like spaghetti or Spaghetti Os

“I miss Jon Stewart,” Jed said. 

He was parked in his regular spot on the sectional sofa Mary had only acquiesced to because it was on sale; she found them, like most objects that were super-sized, to have been satisfyingly functional in their original incarnation and problematic in unanticipated ways once they were magnified. However, the couch had fit the space well, was a stain-resistant neutral and delivery had been free to their third floor apartment, as well as being 35% off, so she had relented. She still found it annoying how often the remotes got lost between the corner piece and the chaise but such was life. She admitted her sectional ire was easier to rant about than the needlepoint pillow she was doggedly working on. It had been 6 weeks and she’d barely finished the upper right quadrant but the kit had been expensive enough that she didn’t just want to bail on it. And if she put in the effort, the pillow would be gorgeous, even if it held her blood, sweat and tears. At this point, mostly blood from an endless number of pricked fingers. She’d never figured out thimbles.

“Crap,” she exclaimed.

“I think that’s uncalled for—lots of people still miss Jon Stewart. One episode of Comedians in Cars doesn’t make up for the whole Daily Show,” Jed replied. She could tell that he was playing at being offended. He seemed to be hanging onto his mellow, Friday night mood better than she was and had cleaned the entire kitchen after he’d shooed her off to the shower with the instruction “Take your time-- why don’t you use that lavender stuff, it smells so nice.” She’d brought her little Nantucket sewing basket stuffed with the pillow cover back down with her and stowed it next to the couch, aspirationally, before they sat down to dinner. 

It was colder than usual for early November and they’d ordered in rather than deal with bundling back up and then steaming on the T or while waiting for a table. It had also allowed her to let her hair air dry. This meant it was now an unruly mass of curls she’d pulled back with a barrette so that Jed could enjoy loosening it at bed. He always exhaled softly as he pressed the clip’s metal toggle together and it snicked open, spilling her dark hair over her shoulders. She couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t then stroked his hands through her hair, or under it along her neck, or brushed it back from her face with his fingertips, as sure and light as when he did a lumbar puncture on a 4 month old in the ER.

Delivery meant they could eat dinner in a state of undress that would have caused Violet Crawley’s face to freeze that way—Jed was in a mismatched undergrad and med school tee-shirt and sweats, which finally allowed Princeton and Yale to get along. Mary had thrown on the extra-long patterned cardigan her mom had gotten her from the Sundance catalog for Christmas with a pair of ubiquitous black yoga pants and an Emily’s List t-shirt. She’d doubled down on sticking it to the patriarchy by skipping a bra and she thought the other feminist in the household would be pleased by her decision, if things went the direction she expected after dinner and an episode of something mindless. If she still wanted to regain the frame of mind that had said in no uncertain terms to forget the underwire as she dressed before dinner, she’d probably need to set aside the needlepoint. The pattern of the stitches seemed to glare at her, which was a bit sassy for a bunch of peonies.

“I didn’t mean that, I stuck myself again with the needle. It’s kind of taking longer than I had anticipated,” she explained.

“I’m not sure anyone can just needlepoint without paying attention to it, it’s not like all those women residents who can knit through seminar and still get every answer right. And they get a sweater too. It seems unfair,” he mused.

“Well, a) you don’t usually like sweaters, you say they make you too hot and b) I still have to finish this pillow at some point but I see what you mean and c) I hadn’t forgotten the Jon Stewart comment—do you really miss him, or do you just think it’s the idea of him?” Mary replied. It had been a very good dinner and the relief of abandoning the needlepoint had added oomph to her dissertation of a response. Jed actually put down the iPad he’d been scanning and leaned over the kiss her. As her answer had been complex, thoughtful and frankly, impressive, so was Jed’s kiss. Or rather the extended kiss remix that included her neck, the hollow at the base of her throat and a quick but promising squeeze to her bottom. Jed really liked the yoga pants.

“That’s a good question,” he murmured into her ear. She had asked a good question but the tickle of his beard against her throat had driven it from her mind; to be fair, it hadn’t been a burning question but more a discussion point. Sometimes, rarely when he was really angry and might mean it, Jed declared she had missed her calling and should have become a law professor. 

When they fought for real, he didn’t mess around but she was almost always infuriatingly conscious of the fact that the argument would end at some point and they would have to come back from whatever they had said. Once, he’d exploded over that within the context of a fight they were already having. She’d gotten quiet then and turned her back to him. She was a grown-up though, so when she felt him touch her shoulder, she rolled back in the bed and said, “There are things you say you can’t apologize for. I won’t ever do that with you. With Gustav, it ended badly, we both said things—it was worse living with what I’d said to him, after. With you, I think it would break me.” 

He knew the basic details of her relationship with Gustav, how he’d been her TA in undergrad and how it had been a very mild scandal that she’d gone to Europe with him during his post-doc. Her parents had looked grim when she told them but hadn’t tred to dissuade her. When the relationship imploded, she’d ended up finishing her degree at UMass Boston and did her post-bacc at Columbia. The hell of it was they’d really loved each other and they’d both figured out it couldn’t work, but neither one of them could divine how to end it amicably. Her mother had nearly flown to Zurich to help her get home, she’d been so unglued for a week or so. She’d alternated between frantically reassembling her life in Boston with periods of aimlessly surfing the Internet, wishing she could become totally invested in some show so she could get a break from the wreckage of her life. Nothing took, though she never wanted to read _The Far Pavilions_ again, which she had sort of initially immersed herself in when she found it at the airport. She didn’t take up yoga or running and she didn’t volunteer at a free clinic, but she managed to yank herself back together and she thought at least she was less judgmental of other people’s failures. 

She’d told Jed everything she could think of, within reason, not leaving anything out, not even complete relief she’d had when it had turned out she wasn’t pregnant the fourth month they were in Switzerland. It had been clear to her early on that she really liked Jed and she wasn’t going to try to make it work with him without sharing all the crappiest parts of herself. She knew he’d discover them anyway. He didn’t mind talking about his first marriage but he didn’t like to talk about Julie, his college girlfriend who’d had to bring him to rehab and who’d been the only one to call him the first three weeks he was away in Arizona. His parents had refused to pick up. He’d told her about Eliza, his ex-wife, and Julie, the only important relationships he’d ever had, on their fourth date. She’d known he was telling her he was all in. Mary had fallen in love with him already, but the sensible part of her, which was basically sitting on a park bench watching her heart do cartwheels and eat ice cream cones, recognized he was being a grown-up and was able to smile patiently while she sang at the top of her lungs and memorized sonnets and looked for balloon-sellers to buy the last red balloon. They’d been married three years and together for five but he could still get a good cartwheel out of her. 

Tonight, she stuck the landing of the cartwheel-roundoff combo he’d provoked with his dedicated fondling, then nudged him so he sat up, albeit closer than before and she tucked the pillow cover in the basket. She carefully stabbed the needle in the sewing tomato. Jed had enjoyed a lengthy Gaffigan-esque monologue on why it was a tomato and not an apple or a pomegranate. She’d just sort of ignored that one until he said, “Needs smithing, huh?” and she’d said “I don’t think it’s your strongest work, no.”

She pulled her laptop onto her lap as he’d picked the iPad back up but he tugged at her ankles till she shifted and stretched her legs onto his lap. They probably had about 30 min of this in them before agreeing to watch something, but they wouldn’t stay up late. It held no appeal anymore. She remembered being a kid and wanting so much to stay up on New Year’s Eve, or whenever her parents had a party, and now all she wanted was to be able to turn off the light by 11 and know the pager wouldn’t go off and she could stay in bed until 7. 7:30 was unheard of.

“I just think everyone is making Jon Stewart out to be this incomparable menschy monolith and I feel for Trevor Noah and Samantha Bee. I think it’s a memory thing, Jon Stewart now occupies this space in the collective consciousness as being a guy who didn’t pull punches and got it right, morally and ethically, and he did, a lot of the time, but not always. He just did it a lot by the end, so that’s what everyone remembers,” she said, returning to the initial discussion.

“I can’t disagree with that,” Jed replied.

“I know,” she said, “That’s why I win.”

“You win, huh?” he said and then started tickling her feet, stopping before she kicked him and starting to massage her ankles and calves instead. This lasted approximately 9% as long as she would have liked because he went back to looking at something that furrowed his brow, so probably the Times or Vox and not trending YouTube clips. She noodled around, checking out Jezebel and HuffPo and the Times, before trying, once again, to teach her mother the appropriate way to ask questions on Facebook (that is, not in a thread about a possible beach vacation they planned for August). She “liked” a bunch of generically adorable baby pictures belonging to college friends. She reminded herself they had agreed to wait until she finished her fellowship to start trying to have a baby. She felt the visceral longing for a non-generic baby whose dark eyes would remind her of Jed’s, the silken curve of a neck she would be so careful to support, the press of a small face asleep against her breast, her shoulder, her elbow’s crook. Jed seemed blithely confident about the whole thing. But Mary worried she’d waited too long and that there would be some sort of cosmic irony about her struggling to attain the goal she had so long seen as a obstacle at best and disaster when she felt totally exhausted by bad call nights or while plotting all the multitude of steps, like the infinite reflections of pair of opposing mirrors generated, required to become an attending pediatric oncologist. She felt like she had to giving curing childhood cancer the edge over becoming a mother before she turned 33, but it was close.

Having done all the activities she felt were more virtuous, she clicked over to her Tumblr tab and scrolled down a lot of gif-sets of tea-cups. And very beautiful, very expensive, very beaded couture dresses. And posts about Poldark and Tony Stark and Aaron Burr. Several people felt very strongly about Steve and Bucky and the love that dare not speak its name, which she understood, that kiss with the niece had just been lame, but nothing about Captain America and his inflated forearms really resonated with her. There was a custom election tee-shirt for Martha Washington & Abigail Adams 2016! with the tagline, “If Mama ain’t happy…” that made her chuckle. Then she hit the Tumblr jackpot.

Someone whose writing she liked had just posted a complete, multi-chaptered fic and there were no pairings that squicked her out. It was like sinking into a warm bath on a Saturday night and knowing Jed would bring her a mug of Darjeeling as the water cooled, then add some hot water to the bath so she didn’t have to move even her toe to the faucet. She clicked and started to read, enjoying knowing she had days of forty-five minute increments of reading ahead of her. Suddenly, Jed laughed aloud beside her.

“What?” she asked, briefly looking up. His brow was unfurrowed, which meant he’d probably switched over to some pop culture review, like a comparison of the various Avengers, or maybe an article on the evolution of the spaghetti western. She could name all the Avengers and he could name all the Crawleys. They’d once hosted a “Marvel-Ous Downton” bingo party with canapés a la Tony Stark on New Year’s Eve that not one person had complained about being dry, drink or entertainment-wise. Mary felt the Venn diagram of their media interests overlapped ideally with enough that was separate—Jed’s love of war documentaries, opera and 70s funk, her own fondness for telenovelas, YA fantasy novels, especially if there was a witch, and Bob Ross (of whom, Jed always remarked, “but his hair is literally obscene, you have to see that”) to make for an easy time when they were together and when one was alone while the other was on-call.

“There’s a post I found about outrageous fanfic tags and this one tag is just absurd,” he said.

“Yeah?” she remarked with half her attention. The other half was squarely focused on the story she was reading. She found herself sinking back down into it when Jed laughed again, even louder.

“This one is worse,” he announced. She bookmarked the story and closed the tab. A deliciously long fanfic was not something to waste. He would keep interrupting her now, she recognized the signs, and she figured she could read it tomorrow afternoon when he went to go play squash or racquetball with Henry. She could never keep the two straight which she was sort of proud of, actually; she just reminded him to bring the safety glasses. She usually spent the time straightening up the apartment, even when he explicitly told her to just do something fun for herself, but 187K words of prime fanfiction beckoned and she was between novels. And Emma was on call. So, there was really no question.

“Okay, just tell me already,” she said, only a little put out. She wasn’t going to stay up all night reading the story and she was early in the chapter, an easy place to stop and get back into tomorrow afternoon. It had been a long day and she probably only had one TV episode in her anyway. They’d blown through Kimmy Schmidt in a week which she now regretted. Perhaps he would have some documentary idea—she had stopped scoffing at them after “The Queen of Versailles” and while it was never her first choice, she found he did have a way of discovering shows that were compelling. Except for that Norwegian one with the subtitles about the creation of heavy water. That they had mutually bailed on within 3 very dark and strangely greenish minutes with the tiniest subtitles she had ever squinted at.

“The bed is a time machine, multi AU,” he announced and waited for her to burst out laughing. He didn’t really read much fanfiction, well, hardly at all, but he was familiar with the nomenclature that had leaked into popular culture, kind of how she was about tennis scores.

“Really? That doesn’t sound that funny to me,” she said. She wouldn’t necessarily read the story, even if it was a fandom she liked, but she could imagine, the right author might make something surprisingly compelling out of it. 

“Come on, it’s just an excuse to write porn with a hefty dose of costume drama. Best case scenario is it’s like a version of “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever,” but there will be no Barbra Streisand soundtrack,” he said definitively. “Or maybe someone has a fetish about sheets and duvets,” he added.

“Okay, Mr. I-minored-in-theater-because-I-love-musicals-so-damn-much, there is so much to unpack in what you just said, but first of all, you are seriously mansplaining fanfiction to me?” Mary replied. This didn’t feel like a serious argument but they did enjoy some verbal sparring and she had actually thought quite a bit about fanfiction in a feminist context lately. Her service had been unusually slow with no new admissions for the past week which was a blessing as it meant the kiddos she had were stabilizing and actually responding to treatment but also because it helped forestall burnout. To wit, her musings on women writers in multiple genres and being able to read the journal club article 3 days before Journal Club and the then finding the even more interesting one cited in the bibliography. She’d also been planning the aforementioned-on-Facebook beach vacation. She thought she could convince Jed about Prince Edward Island if she agreed they could drive around a lot at sunset and eat lobster every day. She just wanted to go to Green Gables and pretend she had a dress with puffed sleeves.

“I didn’t mean that-- but, I mean, Mary, it’s a time machine bed! Like anyone is going to write a serious science fiction story where the time machine is a bed,” he retorted after an initial verbal hiccup. He said “bed” with the same inflection as “den of iniquity,” “brothel” or “Gomorrah.”

“Still mansplaining… and now, with more sci-fi. You really want to go there with me? Because superheroes and Marvel vs. DC Comics doesn’t add much to your sci-fi geek cred,” Mary replied. 

She’d concluded that having narrowly avoided becoming her TA’s future ex-wife and having to accept it made the most sense to switch her major to German and minor in math to deal with the transfer to UMass and the need to graduate without too much debt, made acknowledging that she was a mid-range sci-fi geek small potatoes. It could be just another facet of her personality, not the defining characteristic she’d worried over as a younger adolescent; she’d had some weird worry that liking Star Trek would somehow drive out any other contradictory feature of herself. Fortunately, she had not stayed 14. 

She’d been sort of pleased she had a harder time letting go of her dream of a doctorate in math than the sci-fi geek identity crisis—she recognized she didn’t have the sheer mathematical power to go as far as she would want and she felt like she’d be more satisfied practicing medicine and enjoying math for itself. Still it made for some sleepless nights as she tried to decide what the hell to do with her life, post-Gustav, when it was clear she couldn’t simply make a neat decision tree or figure out her options with stats. Her grandfather had been a doctor and it seemed like it was a way to harness her practical scientific bent to something that unequivocally made a difference. She still loved math though, the puzzles and the purity of it. She kept in touch with her college roommate Dot who really was a math genius, like Fields Medal caliber, and got to enjoy mathy gossip about string theory and Lie algebras with someone she’d regularly loaned tampons and shared pizza with. Never pineapple though—there were some lines you couldn’t cross.

“Ok, ok,” Jed threw his hands up and smiled at her. “I do agree you know more than I do about this, so tell me—what do you make of that tag, since it didn’t make you laugh at all?”

“I don’t know how the actual story is going to play out, but it seems to me a bed is no stranger a time machine than a telephone booth or whatever vehicle gets commandeered or built. I mean, a bed makes a lot of sense if you think about it—you go to sleep and wake up in a different time—that’s kind of what dreams are like already. Bill Murray wakes up in the same bed over and over in “Groundhog Day” which is sort of the inverse of a time machine—or the machine’s broken and is… stuttering on the same time,” she said. It had been a while since she’d gotten to have this kind of conversation with him and she realized she missed it. He was a very active listener, nodding and making little uh-huh sounds as she talked without trying to interrupt. She could see he was thinking about what she said and would likely have some other very interesting question to pose next. She found it super hot though he’d probably chuckle at her if she told him.

“I mean, I grant you, it could totally turn into smut which sounds like a waste of a time machine to me, but even if it did, that’s still valid if it’s what the author wants to write. Quite frankly, the bed time machine plot device is a lot more complex than you’d expect if someone just wants to write about characters having sex,” she said.

“What do you mean?” he said. 

“I mean, why bother having to explain the big McGuffin of a time machine that’s a bed? There’s got to be some way the time travel itself gets addressed in the story or it’s a distraction. And there’s always some reasoning behind why the author ended up picking a certain time period, what’re the characters going to do that they can only do then, prior to the main event? If you just want the characters in another time in costumes, theeing and thouing, you don’t need a time machine. You can sort of plop them there anyway as long as you keep some of their basic features intact. Like, the guy is snarky and the girl always thinks she’s right, she’s still a brunette, he has a beard.” she smirked a little. “If someone wants to read smut just for smut’s sake, they’re not going to stop reading because the characters don’t have a really long and involved conversation first about Lafayette or with him, or because there’s not an interesting plot development about arriving in the wrong century. They don’t call it porn-without-plot for nothing,” she explained.

“Hmmm. I feel like we’re on Pop Culture Happy Hour, you’re like my Audie Cornish of fanfiction,” he said and she laughed. It was their favorite podcast for the longish car rides they made to visit her parents in Manchester. “But, did I laugh at the tag because I’m a jerk? Or do we just have really different senses of humor?” he asked. 

“I don’t think you’re a jerk, you know that, I married you—but I think there’s an underlying message that fan fiction **is** inherently worthy of mockery. Like, it’s always silly or embarrassing-- God knows, I still sort of feel that way sometimes, and I think it’s because we assume women are the writers the majority of the time. And the bed just sort of doubles-down on that, since it’s a much more ‘feminine’ object than a TARDIS being a phone booth or a big metal kettle, like in _End of Eternity_ ,” Mary said. 

“I can’t decide whether I think fanfiction readers and writers are overly sensitive about people making fun of them, because I keep seeing these posts about how everything in classical literature was fanfiction and I think ‘the lady doth protest too much,’ or whether as much as I want to be an evolved and not-douchey guy, I’m still basically an entitled white guy and I need to own my bias more… saying it out loud, it seems like it’s probably the second thing because I would so much rather it be the first,” Jed paused. “But why do you think you feel embarrassed about reading fanfiction? I mean, you’re not embarrassed to talk about it with me, right?”

“No, but, and don’t take this the wrong way, you don’t count anymore. I mean, I share everything with you, you take care of me when I get gastro. I’ve seen all those pictures from when you were twelve, the quote-unquote unfortunate ones. I don’t have stuff I don’t tell you and vice versa. I guess, it’s a persona thing—you get all the Marys but in the outside world, I don’t know that I want to share fanfiction-reading Mary with say, Henry or Clay or even Aurelia, like I would just off-handedly mention the stupid needlepoint pillow, because I wouldn’t want to take on the judgment from them. I expect they would judge first based on their impressions of fanfiction, which is usually somewhere between written-by-cat-ladies or bodice-rippers-plus-dystopia. Fanfiction started as this marginalized thing and it’s always hard to get something that sort of belongs to not-a-white-guy accepted. Like, rock and roll because it was associated with African-Americans,” she said. Jed was nodding along now and she felt she was making some decent points, even if she was not at her most incisive on a Friday night. 

“But Sam, I’d expect he would think it must be something interesting because I’m interested in it. That’s would be enough for him and I wouldn’t feel like it would change his opinion of me, it just literally hasn’t come up,” Mary said. She hadn’t really articulated it to herself before but it was true. Her sister Caroline was vaguely aware of her fandom interests, because she’d let her borrow her laptop when she was visiting and there were open tabs. She hadn’t said much, just commented that she preferred Gosford Park to Downton to which Mary readily agreed. And Emma had been known to dabble in various fandoms, though she always seemed to like rare-pairs and that kind of squelched things because she could never find anything she wanted to read. 

Mary herself went through phases, sometimes losing interest for months and then some episode or comment somewhere made her poke around the Internet and voilà, the search was on to see what someone else had made out of Little Dorrit’s interior life or Meg Murry’s first kiss. There’d been a luxurious weekend when Jed was at some ropes course team-building exercise he had bemoaned, decried and derided ceaselessly via text and voicemail (he would have written a letter and shoved it in a bottle if he could have, she felt certain, just to know that in some distant future, his frustration would continue to be heard). She had found an overlooked trove of X-Files stories with just the right balance of angst, conspiracy and romance without a major character death warning and she’d read straight through a whole day into the early night that came with November in Boston. She’d ordered take-out Chinese, eaten all the dumplings first, and had kept reading until 1 am. 

“So you end up using your own projection of how someone will respond to you reading fanfiction as a measure of the level of emotional intimacy you have with them?” Jed asked. He’d really paid attention during his psych rotation but it was more the years of therapy he’d been to himself that allowed him to ask questions like that. It could get a little spooky and Viennese with his beard, especially if he was wearing his tweed jacket.

“I guess. I don’t really like how I’ve internalized this idea that fanfiction is sort of lame or embarrassing,” Mary remarked. 

“Well, the standards you set for yourself are kind of impossible, Mary. Maybe lighten up a little on yourself that you’re not doing a hobby right?” Jed suggested.

“I think it’s weird that I wouldn’t necessarily have thought to call it a hobby, but that’s what it is. Like, at some level, I must share the idea you have about it being ‘unreal’ vs. ‘real’ science fiction, but that would mean the determining factor for validity is getting published, right? And getting money for the writing. Which, pardon the pun, I don’t buy,” she said, then interrupted herself with a yawn. It was later than she had thought—watching anything on TV seemed unreasonable and Jed had sort of sidled over as they’d been talking. His hands had started doing some interesting things and the idea of bed, without or without a time machine component, was seeming increasingly appealing. Still, she made a valiant effort to finish up her line of reasoning.

“Maybe I think it’s embarrassing because of the name, even. Like, it doesn’t have to be called fanfiction, we could call it metafiction or sourced fiction or something that made it clear it was borrowing from another work. The fan- prefix has a pejorative feel to it, like you’ve lost all reason and drunk the Kool-Aid about whatever you are a fan of. It sort of puts the author always in a… supplicant position to the original work, even though we could just as easily see it as an off-shoot, like _Wide Sargasso Sea_. I mean, some of the shows fanfiction ends up getting written about are so badly written themselves, the fanfiction is a clear step up,” Mary said. She stopped because she’d mostly figured that was what she wanted to say but also because Jed was now full-on distracting her, stroking a careful hand along the outside of her thigh, tucking an errant curl behind her ear.

“I gather you’re ready to be done with this conversation, huh?” she said dryly. He grinned.

“Can we put it on mid-season hiatus? It doesn’t have to be an abandoned story, a whatchamacallit, do people pronounce WIP as a word like “whip” or spell it out?” he asked. 

“You know, I don’t know. I’m not sure it’s as fraught a discussion as the way to pronounce gif,” Mary replied.

“It’s just, this is what I end up missing the most when we’re both on call or wiped out from a really busy rotation,” Jed said. He was so warm and it felt so good to be next to him.

“You miss me holding forth about fanfiction and calling you out for mansplaining and then making out on the couch?” she asked.

“I miss my Mary, so bright and full of ideas and… awake, I miss you not letting me get away with being intellectually lazy or being an entitled asshole, like that shitty resident Byron from ortho,” he said. She wrinkled her nose when he mentioned Byron; Sam had nearly had an aneurysm the last time that screw-up had consulted on one of their kiddos with osteo and had immediately talked about an above-the-knee amputation. Jed saw he’d fumbled the incipiently romantic mood, drew one gentle finger along her cheekbone, then down to her parted lips. It was like he’d flipped a switch, she was **on** , she could feel every place he touched her and she wanted more.

“And I miss making out on the couch, yes,” he finished. He’d shifted and he took her in his arms, was nuzzling at her neck where the cardigan had slipped and the Emily’s List tee-shirt neckline gaped. 

“Tomorrow, you can tell me all about whether time travel is even viable, I know you have an opinion,” he said. “You can even math it up, I think I can follow it enough now, I finished the third Brian Greene book and I’m halfway through _Godel, Escher, Bach_.”

“Wow, you know how to sweet-talk a girl,” Mary said. It would have been a better rejoinder if she hadn’t sighed at the end, because, really, he knew how to sweet-talk her. Just then, he became a little bolder and eased a hand under her shirt. She waited for the happily surprised breath he would exhale, the one she had anticipated hours ago when she got dressed and left off her bra.

“Why, Mary Susannah Phinney!” Jed stroked along the curve of her breast, cupped it in his palm. His touch was confident and she felt him smile against her cheek. It had been a while since they had the time to be playful together and she’d missed that, missed his sly looks and jokes, the goodbye kiss he would intensify until they were both breathless and late and would have to run to the T with barely any oxygen left in their lungs.

“There was no point, we weren’t going out again and I thought, you had a hard time the last time you tried to get the bra off with one hand, let me, oh yes!, let me make it easy for you, mmm,” she replied. He was caressing her more insistently now and had started to kiss the soft skin under her jaw.

“Ah, you’re so good to me, sweetheart, you taste like honey. How did I get so lucky?” he murmured. Maybe the sectional was good for more than lounging while watching TV or spreading out charts that needed to be finished. He eased her down and had found the perfect percent of his body to rest against her, not even close to crushing her but deliciously strong and male. She could feel him hard through the sweats, felt that tension of him wanting to move against her already. She shrugged to let the cardigan fall over her shoulders and it pressed her breast more firmly into his hand. Mary felt his mouth gasp against her carotid, the heat of his tongue against her pulse. 

The few prefrontal cortical and hippocampal neurons she had available returned to his question “How did I get so lucky?” and she traveled back to the university library they had met in, the windows dark and slick with a pelting rain ambivalent about becoming ice. He’d settled at the long table she was at, her domain marked by her opened books, a travel mug of tea, her pager and she’d glanced at him; Jed created a similar kingdom and still had his hospital ID clipped to his button down front pocket, his bow tie a little askew. She’d thought maybe she should have actually changed into regular clothes instead of wearing her scrubs home over her red turtleneck but reminded herself there was a good chance he would be brash or self-important. The bow tie hadn’t boded well. She didn’t recognize him from the pediatrics residency and generally only peds residents and fellows managed the bow tie as a fun accessory; it was otherwise the harbinger of utter humorlessness and a reliance on the formality of the good old days when someone like Mary would be a secretary or nurse and was thus still treated accordingly.

But he’d only cleared his throat a little, nudged over a bag of fresh oatmeal cookies, and said, “Is it Marilee? I’m Jed Foster, second year neuro and someone, well actually like everyone I asked, said you were the best at statistics in the whole hospital and I can’t finish this paper, or even risk showing it to anyone important, without making sure the methods and results sections are done right. I’m pretty sure they’re not. The cookies are oatmeal chocolate chip and they’re totally a bribe. Will you take a look?” He’d smiled hopefully at her then and she’d thought, what the hell, her own work was going to be there later, the next day, there would always be more work but this might be interesting and he had such beautiful dark eyes and she didn’t have any plans tonight anyway. 

The paper hadn’t been too bad, a little snarled, but nothing she couldn’t reconfigure. She pointed out some problems, then started recapping the more critical statistical principles he’d need to address when he nodded and asked more questions. She’d sensed she was the first person to actually teach him anything beyond the null hypothesis so that he truly understood it. It was a shame, because the paper’s design was quite elegant and it would have been sunk by the weak analysis. She’d wondered how many other papers he’d worked on that had been hamstrung by inadequate regression analyses or awkwardly written results sections.

He’d gone back to work on the paper for a while, humming under his breath—it sounded like South Pacific’s “Younger Than Springtime.” She’d tried to focus on the article she had been reading before, but between the rainy night and the sound of his baritone, the oatmeal cookie that had only reminded her she hadn’t had any lunch and only a granola bar for breakfast, and the unexpectedly appealing angle of his bearded jaw against his loosened collar, she’d given up and daydreamed for a few minutes before admitting she’d be better off warming up leftovers at home and trying to get through the backlog of notes or her laundry.

“Can you see if it’s right now, please?” he’d asked.

“It’s Mary, by the way, not Marilee and sure. But I think I’m leaving after this, so,” she’d trailed off, peering at the notes, the lines he’d crossed out, and saw she’d maybe not explained as well as she’d thought. 

“Um, no, it’s still not right. The ANOVA is all scrambled up and the R2, the F-distribution isn’t--” she began. She looked up at his laugh. He had such bright eyes and his gaze was very…appreciative.

“The F-distribution? I didn’t know stats could be so… salacious,” he’d quipped, raising his eyebrows.

“Wow, that’s like the worst joke I’ve heard all week. Or was that a pass? I couldn’t tell,” she’d shot back.

“Given that it failed in both categories, maybe you can just forget I said it. How about this—would you go out to dinner with me? It doesn’t have to be tonight, but I think you deserve more than an oatmeal cookie from Au Bon Pain for all your hard work,” he’d said.

She’d considered it. There hadn’t been a lot of offers after she’d broken up with Gustav but she’d said no to whatever had come her way. Maybe it was time to try saying yes again. They could always talk shop if nothing else—the paper made it clear he was goddamn smart and he didn’t seem completely full of himself.

“Ok,” she’d agreed and started collecting her books and papers. He’d made a sudden, small gesture, as if he meant to put his hand on her forearm to stop her, but had caught himself.

“I want to ask again though, that was terrible. Mary, would you please go out to dinner with me? Not because I’m paying you back for fixing my paper, but because you’re smart and funny and I’ve never seen someone look so damn beautiful in a turtleneck with, are those pinecones? all over it,” he’d said. He’d looked directly at her, waiting but eager, and it had been easy to say yes again, and to talk to him for hours through four courses at Sorellina, and to let him thoroughly kiss her in the doorway of her crappy apartment, both of his hands holding her face. It had been easy to accept it when he said he’d call her tomorrow and to laugh, bemused, when her cell rang at 7:15 am and she’d heard him say, “It’s not too early, right? It’s after 7, Mary, I couldn’t wait any longer.”

He’d been kissing her the whole time she was remembering, stroking her just how she wanted with his clever hands, and she felt the excited hunger she’d had for him that first night and the deeper, more comprehensive love she had for him now, her husband. Mary did a quick calculus, there’d be time to wash the sectional’s slipcovers while Jed was playing squashketball with Henry and she’d still be able to read her story while the washer dealt with whatever mess lovemaking on the couch would yield; Henry and Aurelia weren’t coming over until 6 to have Jed’s insane nachos and finally watch the Eurovision finale they’d DVRed months ago. She raised her hips to shimmy her yoga pants down. She didn’t want to stop touching Jed for even a minute, toed off her black pants and started in on the drawstring of his sweats, her hands grazing the bare skin of his stomach. He shuddered and she knew it would only be a few moments before she had him, so hot and right and deep, a perfect proof. He looked at her then, a question in his eyes, his cheeks pink, and she whispered back:

“You didn’t get lucky. You sucked at stats.”

**Author's Note:**

> So, my middle child gave me the prompt "bed time machine" and this was what I made of it. I wanted to use the prompt in an interesting way and explore fan fiction while writing it, as well as see how many pop culture references I could just jam in this sucker. And my fanon Mary is super into math, so I kept that in as well. Nearly every reference in here is Google-able, so I'll keep this section shorter. The title comes from a physicist talking about time travel:
> 
> J. Richard Gott (Astrophysicist)  
> “Cosmic strings are either infinite or they’re in loops, with no ends. So they are either like spaghetti or Spaghetti Os. The approach of two such [loop] strings parallel to each other, will bend space-time so vigorously and in such a particular configuration that [it] might make time travel possible – in theory. This is a project a super civilization might attempt,” says Gott. “It’s far beyond what we can do. We’re a civilization that’s not even controlling the energy resources of our planet.”


End file.
